Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 23, 2014 @01:10PM
from the pick-your-battles dept.

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes:
Facebook threatened to banish drag queen pseudonyms, and (some) users revolted
by flocking to Ello, a social network which promised not to enforce real
names and also to remain ad-free. Critics said that the idealistic model would
buckle under pressure from venture capitalists. But both gave scant mention
to the fact that a distributed social networking
protocol, backed by a player large enough to get people using it,
would achieve all of the goals that Ello aspired to achieve, and more. Read on for the rest.

At the end of September,
"FacebookDragQueenGate"
fell from the sky like a gift from the
gods to the founders (and
venture capital backers) of the
Ello social network.
The company promised not only to remain ad-free and to allow drag queen stage names, but even stated that they planned to
allow
pornographic content (something that received relatively little press, compared to the ad-free model).
But critics such as Aral Balkan wrote that once Ello received venture capital funding,
the backers
would inevitably pressure the company
to change its relationship with its users in order to make money.
In
an interview published in Forbes on Monday, Harvard Business School professor
John Deighton
was blunt: "The board will need to monetize the membership in whatever fashion ensures a profitable
return of capital for the venture fund’s investors. So my advice, if they believe Ello is still viable by then, is to buy out
[Paul Budnitz, the idealistic founder who came up with the 'no ads' idea]."

There is, in short, nothing to stop Ello from doing what Facebook does whenever they make a significant change to their
Terms of Service: presenting users with a dialog box next time they sign in, saying, "These are the new rules, by checking this
box, you are agreeing to abide by the new contract which you're not going to read."
If Ello succeeds beyond its founders' dreams, then its ad-free nature might start to hinge on its founders all turning down
buyout offers of tens of millions of dollars to stick to their ideals -- hardly a sure thing. Or the VCs might get enough
seats on the board that they can outvote the founders and render their objections moot.

As Joshua Kopstein
writes in an editorial
for Al-Jazeera America, what really would have changed the game would have been a distributed,
decentralized social network.
I already wrote
twopieces
arguing that a distributed social network could work, and how -- a protocol that allows users to create profiles,
"status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server,
but that can interact with users' profiles hosted on other servers.
I don't want to re-hash all the details here, but the short version is that there seems to be nothing about social networks,
as we currently use them, which would require all of the data to be stored in a single centralized system.
In a distributed protocol, you could host your profile with any hosting company, and users could "subscribe" to updates
from your profile, as well as the ability to receive invites to your events and your groups, and direct messages from you.
Think RSS feeds, but with better support for well-defined objects like "event invites".

If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or
threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company, the same way that any person or company can
currently switch their domain name between hosting providers.
This, obviously, would instantly render moot any one company's policies about "real names" (or porn, for that matter) -- all
you have to do is find at least one company, anywhere in the world, whose policies are permissive enough to host your
profile, and that should be possible for all but the most extreme or illegal content.

This also renders moot all the worries about profile hosting companies trying to amass tens of millions of users and then
stabbing them in the back, by changing the terms of service to allow them to sell user data or stuff unwieldy ads down their
throat. When users can switch seamlessly between hosts, no one host is going to be able to "charge" more than the going
market rate for hosting a profile (where "charging" could be in the form of monetary payment or displaying ads to the user).
How much would it actually cost to host a profile for the typical user these days, complete with all their photos and
status updates? It's hard to know, because other than university professors, nobody really has personal webpages any more,
after they all went to MySpace and then to Facebook.
But since the old days when people did actually host their own personal pages, hosting and serving data
has gotten really, really cheap. For the average user, with a few hundred photos and a few hundred friends looking at
them, $1 per year might be enough. Maybe they'd just have to watch one of those ads once a year
that Youtube puts in front of a Beyoncé music video, and that would cover it.

Unfortunately, to many people the concept of distributed social networking is linked with the failure of
Diaspora, the most ambitious attempt to create a decentralized protocol to compete
with the likes of Facebook. But Diaspora didn't fail because the idea lacked merit; it almost certainly failed because
people asked the same question that they asked of any other upstart Facebook competitor: Why should I join, when all of
my friends are on Facebook instead? Of course people might reasonably asked the same question about Google+, but
when Google launches a product, people join because they know the quality will be decent, they know that probably some of
their friends will join because of the Google brand, and they know people will be buzzing about it anyway so they want
to join in order to see what the big deal is.

And that brings up the story's second moral: Despite what you may have heard from your cousin who just read The Fountainhead,
the products that are the most successful are not necessarily the best, by any objective measure; rather, they're usually
the ones that had major backing (Google+) or were the beneficiaries of a staggering lucky break (Ello). Diaspora didn't
take off, because it didn't have either one of these.

And since you cannot manufacture a lucky break, I continue to believe that the last best hope for truly free social
networking -- with minimal censorship, and ads and costs kept to a minimum by market competition -- would be for a major
player like Google to launch a social networking protocol, and to set up themselves as the default host for new profiles,
but allowing the protocol to interoperate seamlessly with profiles hosted elsewhere.
Either that, or if the system is launched by a startup or a nonprofit,
make sure that you have a host of widely respected luminaries or organizations standing ready to help promote
it -- if the
EFF and the BoingBoing guys endorsed a new social
networking system as the future of Internet freedom, people would join because it would seem uncool not to.
As long as the product itself is functional, just have the right connections lined up when you launch it. Because
that's what matters, and don't let the deluded ghost of Ayn Rand tell you otherwise.

It may well, somehow, be our fault that you are cracked, but it an absolute certainty that our habits of actually talking to people are superior to yours of sitting at a table or walking down the street with your friends, looking only at your phones, as you busily talk to anyone but the people you're actually with.

"Cayenne8, prepare yourself for transfer to re-education camp ZuckerPage-9 by creating your required Facebook and Google+ accounts. Failure to do so will result in your being relocated to a trailer down by the river."

actually I have to disagree. It is so much easier to stay connected to friends that have long moved away and to reconnect with friends that move back. Of course I am older than most people on Slashdot so yes I have friends that moved away 15 years ago and then move back to town that I want to reconnect with.It is makes me feel more connected with my brother that lives 3 hours away to see his posts daily on facebook. I do call and talk with him a couple of times a month but with facebook it is daily.Of course I used to do the same thing with email but email is less popular than it once was.

actually I have to disagree. It is so much easier to stay connected to friends that have long moved away and to reconnect with friends that move back. Of course I am older than most people on Slashdot so yes I have friends that moved away 15 years ago and then move back to town that I want to reconnect with.
It is makes me feel more connected with my brother that lives 3 hours away to see his posts daily on facebook. I do call and talk with him a couple of times a month but with facebook it is daily.
Of cou

Ello have covenanted themselves in a legally binding way so that they cannot ever have ads or show other people's ads, and so that they are required to make imposition of the same covenant terms on any buyer a condition of sale.

So, no, they can't just do what facebook did, and neither can anyone they sell to.

I do wish Diaspora had taken off though. That seemed quite good. Needed a bit of polish, but definitely promising. Never got the critical mass though.

Diaspora needed more than a bit of polish, and that may have contributed to its lack of uptake. If you want to convince people to switch from FB to your network, you better have an amazing user experience. For the inexperienced user who isn't interested in setting up a server themselves, it needs to have the same ease of use as a centralized social network. And with those users now at least somewhat aware of privacy-related issues, you had better be able to offer them some assurances as to the safety of

I already made a fairly lengthy post about this above, but for advertising security as a killer feature, it became very clear that they had no clue what they were doing. It wasn't that they missed a few bugs, it was that their fundamental design didn't incorporate anything more complex than "check if the user is logged in before doing stuff". You can't just fix that.

Needed a bit of polish, but definitely promising. Never got the critical mass though.

Understatement! Diaspora was a complete mess.

Security was the problem everyone focused on. Good security is built in at a foundation level and a fundamental component to the entire design and implementation.

Generally when you are talking about a secure application, you have a primitive layer which does authentication and data access, and a layer on top of that which provides logic and user interface with all data access going through that first layer using some kind of authentication token. In this way, a small bug in say, the image upload script, won't let you do much because all operations through the primitive secure layer require an authentication token, which limits the scope of what those operations can do (to say, the logged in user).

Shitty security, like what diaspora had, basically does checks at the top layer (is this user logged in? good.. run this query!). The problem with this is that a small bug _anywhere_ gives you full access to _anything_, which is precisely what was happening. Sure you can patch those small bugs as you find them, but there will always be more.

In other words, it wasn't that diaspora had some security bugs or needed some polish, it was that security wasn't an integral part of the software, which can't really be fixed without a complete rewrite.

The less focused on problem was that the thing wasn't built to a specification, they just kinda started coding it. If you want to build something open and interoperable, that's not how you do it!

And then the main problem was that it had no killer feature to attract users. It did what the other two established offerings did, except without the established user base. Being full of security holes and having no api arn't really thinks most users care about, yet it still failed to gain any kind of adoption.

I honestly felt kind of sad for the team (one of whom apparently killed himself, possibly over stress of the whole thing). They were all very inexperienced, and we've all at some point said "hah, I could write a better <something> in a few weeks!" at that point in our careers. Usually we take a crack at it, realize we are in way over our heads, and it dies quietly. These guys got a shit tonne of attention, were obligated to produce something they didn't have the skills to produce, and then basically crashed and burned before us all.

Two articles in a row about ello? Anyway, as usual, BH is overthinking things.

>> If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company,

Duh...we already have a widely-adopted system to personally identify most people. It's called a "cell phone number," and we already have the mechanisms to transfer it between companies. Roll up an identification and au

>> It would be hard to come up with a protocol to host your profile "on your cell phone number", as opposed to hosting it at a webpage which can be accessed under your domain.

Hmmm...try to think this through from the perspective of a mere mortal non-techie. (Not everyone knows how to stand up a web site.) If you had a portable profile that your cell phone company hosted (as long as you had your number with them), that could be accessed via web site, web service, etc. and could use a DNS-like servic

A PITA, sure, but even now, I'd claim that personal cell phone adoption is higher than any possible universal ID system would ever hope to achieve. (e.g., Think of all the whining about ID cards and voting: many activist claim that it's too hard for people to get drivers licenses or free ID cards when a lot of the "disenfranchised" already have their own cell phone!)

Since when is it a requirement to sell ads in order to make a profit? Since when is "selling ads" the only way to make a profit? The entire premise is idiotic, because it presumes that "selling ads" is the only way to achieve cash flow.

If you create a service, and price it reasonably, you can charge a subscription / membership fee, and have a perfectly profitable business.

I pay for services all the time, why should an online service be any different?

If you create a service, and price it reasonably, you can charge a subscription / membership fee, and have a perfectly profitable business.

I pay for services all the time, why should an online service be any different?

There is very little evidence that that is true if you look at services on the web today. To the contrary, ads very often are the only way entire industries can profit on the web. Take newspapers: with only a handful of exceptions like the WSJ, every major newspaper in the country has had to switch to an entirely ad-supported model on the web, abandoning all their old subscription profits.

I'm not saying a paid Facebook-like service is impossible, just that there's (relatively) scant evidence that one could succeed.

If there was a truely open, distributed, social platform/framework, I could totally see it being coupled with email accounts. Some email services are paid, some are free. The provider could either have ad supported service, or paid, or both.

The fact you would have a choice in where your data is held, is the important part, though.

Yes, if either via a separate program or as part of an existing service, everyone had a personal mailing list, the 'social network' aspects would be separated from the transportation method. You would 'follow' someone by sending them a subscribe message (or your app would do it when you clicked a button).

A reader could display a digest of all such mails from the people you follow (maybe sorted by tags added to headers).

Someone without any specialized program could still subscribe and get your mails. Convers

The problem with this recent crop of op-ed's is that it gives the editors the perfect to show off how much they don't know or understand. For instance, the pot-shot at Randian capitalism (disclaimer: I'm no fan of Rand and I'm pretty sure she would hate my guts) tells me that he has never actually read Ayn Rand, and if he did, did not understand what he was reading.

the products that are the most successful are not necessarily the best, by any objective measure

There IS no objective measure. One man's trash, yadda yadda yadda. The most successful products meet the most demand at the most sustainable price and supply. Period.

And since you cannot manufacture a lucky break

Bullshit. No one gets sucess by happy accident and remains so. Lottery winners lose their money within months. The coolest invention with a bad business model goes kaput. The richest tech guys toiled in a basement or garage or dorm room for years on end before they got their break. No one succeeds without busting their balls and working hard. Luck plays a factor. Luck can open a window, but it can't make you successful.

As long as the product itself is functional, just have the right connections lined up when you launch it. Because that's what matters, and don't let the deluded ghost of Ayn Rand tell you otherwise.

I don't even know what to make of this ignorant word salad. Pick up a book and read it sometime.

Of course there are objective measures of product quality: Which vehicle is the most energy efficient? Which vehicle, on average, lasts the longest without needing major repairs? Which phone has the best battery life? And on and on. TFA's point was that the products that end up "winning" in the market are not necessarily better than their competitors by these objective standards. That is in perfect agreement with your statement about which products succeed.

TFA's point was that the products that end up "winning" in the market are not necessarily better than their competitors by these objective standards.

Then those objective measures do not actually indicate consumer value, which is what we're really talking about when we say "best".

Off the top of my head, some of the "famous for being famous" celebrities come to mind.

Most celebutants do indeed crash and burn. We see it all the time. A fool and his money, and all that. If you refer to Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, then as much as I am loath to say this, they are brilliant marketers offering a product that their intended market simply can't get enough of. Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes lacked this business acumen, so they turned into cautio

You are assuming that Beats are audio headphones, and judging them on that basis. Beats are a fashion accessory and a status symbol first, and an audio device second. My nine year old niece loves her Beats.They look cute, and sound much better than the throw away earbuds she got with her ipod. In that respect they are a great product, and fulfill her requirements better than any other headphone.

It was called the World Wide Web. People made their own websites with their own domains. If they liked something, they linked to it They communicated on mailing lists or web forums or by IM or IRC. All the tech is still there, and we can go back to using it instead of feeding our lives into one corporate silo after another.

As I read this article, I was reminded of the push back in the 90's to get off the corporate networks (Compuserve, AOL, etc.) where data and people were walled off from opposing networks, and dive into the World Wide Web. At some point the pendulum swung back towards the value brought by corporate networks, the biggest of which seems to be ease of construction compared to traditional web design.I first noticed the shift with community sites like angelfire/geocities and then moving towards social networks, where you just add content.

Now the pendulum is swinging back again because the cost/value equation in favor of corporate networks makes less sense (specifically, we didn't realize the consequences of selling ourselves and our data for 'free' services until it was too late.).

I'd mod you up, but I can't in this thread for obvious reasons. I'm too young to have much direct experience with the 90s corporate networks (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.) aside from using AOL CDs as cat toys - I'd reflect sunlight off the shiny side and let the cat chase the light spot.

The thing is, I can't deny that corporate sites aren't entirely useless. I met my wife on a Yahoo! forum, for Hell's sake. But writing messages on a corporate-run web forum was one thing. People are pouring their entire li

Over the years I've had four registered domains. My current one live on one of the big corporate hosters, and it runs on WordPress, which is actually quite fun to manage. I put new content about once a month, sometimes more. It really is a lot of fun and I have complete control. That is one of the things about FB that I could never accept, combined with the fact that FB is 99% fluff/krap, and, the interface is absolutely abhorrent. At least Google+ has a half decent ui.

"Now the pendulum is swinging back again because the cost/value equation in favor of corporate networks makes less sense (specifically, we didn't realize the consequences of selling ourselves and our data for 'free' services until it was too late.)."Nope. The vast majority of people really do not care. For all the outrage over privacy you hear about in the tech press the vast majority of people just do not care.They do not even mind the ads.Why pay for a social network when facebook is free?Facebook is the

Not a whole lot of people I knew and having your own hosting and domain costs a bit, most used third party blogs and forums anyway. And it all lacks authentication and aggregation. Sure, you could set up users and accounts and manage all that but people wouldn't bother to manage 100 separate accounts the way they have 100 friends on one Facebook login. And unless every site it set up with an RSS feed there's no easy way to aggregate lots of blogs and give you one dashboard of what your friends are doing. No

I know. As I said to daemonhunter, being indie is a colossal pain in the ass. Sure, we can save on hosting by using Jekyll and GitHub Pages and then add a CNAME record to point our domains properly, but that requires a DIY approach to making websites that might not appeal to most people.

If you ignore the ability to restrict personal data to particular people, news feed with intelligent ranking that tries to guess who your real friends are so you don't have to upset people who post a lot by defriending them, the ability to tag people in photos, the lack of any need for meaningless URLs and a seamless way of organising events...... then sure. Facebook is just like the web.

If you ignore the ability to restrict personal data to particular people

If you want to keep secrets, keep them in your head. The second you put them on a networked computer, your data is at risk.

news feed with intelligent ranking that tries to guess who your real friends are

No. I don't want a proprietary algorithm deciding what news is important to me. I don't listen to radio because I don't want ClearChannel deciding the soundtrack to my life, so why in Hell's name would I want Facebook deciding who my "re

Thank you sir. That's exactly what we need; we just need to take the web back using open standards.

However, I think one or two major things are currently missing. The first is that the browser needs to be involved - in order to be able to properly authenticate on all your friends' walls/blogs/homepages, we need it to be automated: we need your browser to be able to tell any website you want it to where your online identify "lives". Furthermore, we need those online identies to be able to trust and communica

zmooc, you might be interested in IndieWebCamp [indiewebcamp.com]. One of their principles is that your primary domain name should be your identify on the Web. So, instead of creating handles like "Lilith's Heart-Shaped Ass" (Slashdot, but the truncated it) or "demifiend" (for GitHub), I should be able to use the matthewgraybosch.com domain to authenticate with other sites.

Your suggestions regarding the browser make sense, but I don't have the programming chops to implement them myself, otherwise I'd do it and submit patches

I got my first email account in 1996, and met my wife online in 2000. We've been married 10 years as of this Halloween. You're not alone. I just don't know how to fix the web. It changed while I was busy writing, and I'm just trying to adapt.

Many of the 99% you mention would insist that people who use social networks at all, for any reason, are uncool. You're using a converse of the argument from popularity; the argument from unpopularity.

Seriously? The EFF and BoingBoing are not the epitome of cool to 99% of the population, who probably never even heard of them.

Many of the 99% you mention would insist that people who use social networks at all, for any reason, are uncool. You're using a converse of the argument from popularity; the argument from unpopularity

No, I'm arguing that almost nobody cares about the EFF and BoingBoing because they never even heard about them. You can't be unpopular if nobody knows you exist. Unpopularity would be a step up - "The only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity."

If you're giving any information whatsoever to scumbags like Facebook (such as name, phone numbers, address, etc.), then you're just an idiot. I don't care how much "control" you think you have. If you're not giving any information to them, then you're still stupid for using a cesspit like Facebook, giving them more attention than they deserve.

So what if they have your name and phone number and address. We used to have this thing called a "telephone book" that had all that. We have equivalents on the net. Your "private" info is already out there - and your name and address are not legally considered private info.

As well as any other information that you give them about your daily life, enabling you to be targeted by other scumbag companies that they work with and sell information to, as well as the government.

Also, I don't want to give any more scumbag companies my information; I'm not going to hand it to them on a silver platter. Your argument is essentially, "Your information is probably out there, so just give it to even more companies!" Smart move.

We used to have this thing called a "telephone book" that had all that.

Used to.

We have equivalents on the net. Your "private" info is already out there

People have a right to their private life. However, Facebook users have entered into a (what I consider) sub-optimal agreement wrt users' private info. By nature, any "anti-social media network" (my term for them) will let people know who your friends are. So, even if we had a completely open and distributed social network not controlled by a single source, it's the nature of the beast.

Also, unless you're living off the grid and not filing taxes, driving a car, or anything else, the government has LOTS

Diaspora put the cart before the horse. They developed the relatively easy piece, the local application, and then apparently assumed the federated protocol would reveal itself. Thus far, they don't yet have a formal specification, it's still defined by "how the application interacts on the wire".

Diaspora failed partly because it presents itself in such a confusing way. See Join Diaspora. [joindiaspora.com]: "JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed But don't worry! There are lots of other pods [podupti.me] you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like. There's no "Join" button, but two "Donate" buttons. Take a look at a few "pods". You can't see anything without signing up, and many sound like they're run by wierdos.

The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.

A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present: https://cupcake.io/ [cupcake.io]... an alpha implementation of a distributed social protocol called tent. You can make a free account. There is only one app right now; a Twitter clone called micro. But it works well and there's a good community.

Instead of hosting a social network on a standard web site, it seems like to make it really distributed, it should be more similar to (but not exactly like) BitTorrent where the content originally local to the users computer/phone but mirrored to other client computers so that it is available widely without any sort of centralized control. The size of the content on a social network ends up being large but the updates are usually small. Just an idea, probably others have done it already.

The problem is that if you are hosting the content on your own server, you have ultimate revisionist control of what you've said in the past, and now regret to the point that you're willing to rewrite history. In the limit, there's always the "off" switch if you want to duck out on the responsibility for what you've said.

I'm also not sure I'd be comfortable with some types of content showing up in "my feed", particularly content that happens to be illegal in my jurisd

Very interesting but abandoned low level protocol for distributed social networking.

Uses encryption and trust relationships which can be granted/withdrawn. There was a document describing it, but I cant find it on the net anymore, but the sourcecode is on github. It just needs somebody to set up an easy to access front end.

It's still under development AFAIK and so to say that it failed seems to be the incorrect analysis as best I can tell. It's unclear if it will ever reach a state where it's ready for prime time or whatever, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.

Stage artists where also subjected to the rule. Hence, cEven Key [wikipedia.org] (yes, that's how it's spelt) of Skinny Puppy fame was forced to change his FB account back to his Kevin Crompton causing a very public backslash in his follower's community (incl. myself) where a good number of fans changed their FB name to cEven Key in protest and support.

Eventually FB backtracked and he was able to resume using his stage name (which he has for 30+ years now). But others are still stuck in the bureaucracy of getting their nam

...a protocol that allows users to create profiles, "status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server

I believe that mobile device computing power and storage will advance to the point that everyone will be able to carry his/her own server, removing even the need to contract with a third party for services.

All that's necessary is the user-hardware and the FOSS protocol. No deep-pocketed sponsor necessary.

I had not heard of Diaspora, I am currently working on a personal project to create something to fill a similar gap in the social media framework. (Project yet to be named) My project is different, but I'm not ready to expand on it publicly.

where you hosted your own website and the ICQ persistent presence has a profile page and a dynamic DNS link to your personal server? That was way back when with a teeny little hack you could just link through and have your own free (as in beer) no-ad website and maintain complete control. Then at some point they changed it and the personal space went cloud-based and you lost control (and that's when I stopped using it).

I once started writing a distributed social network, and then life took me on a journey. (I'm still finding the time, though.)

The reason why we don't have one yet is that writing a distributed social network is HARD. It's a much harder problem than inventing the web or email, because the security stakes are much higher. The consequences of spamming and spoofing are even worse than what we see in email; thus an author of a distributed social network needs to solve this problem early in the process.

Why does a distributed social network need servers at all? Why not just flag stuff on your PC to share? It gets copied encrypted into a bittorrent directory using a session key, and that session key is held in a wrapper than can only be unencrypted by the people/group you have 'shared' with. The bittorrent network will ensure it's available even when your computer is off. Adding nodes to boost network speed just means pointing some bittorrent client to that.torrent.

Isn't that the idea? Everyone gets the Facebook(-like thing) they already know and love, only without the evil corporate overlord. If that "large player" became evil, the transitory nature of the setup would let everyone easily abandon that evil player.

But why then would anybody with deep pockets ever invest in creating such an open infrastructure, if at any point their user base could declare them 'evil' and defect to a competitor? Nobody ever will trail blaze product development with the idea of creating a product that someone else can essentially appropriate.

The PR boost might do it. You have to realize that 99% of people would NEVER move their profiles anyway, even if that was a thing.

And since it would almost certainly require specialized server-side software, you could always just retain control over that and at the very least you'd be collecting licensing fees. So the server side would need to be made open (or at least the protocol open enough that the server side could be reverse engineered) in order to have any sort of true freedom.